November 20, 2003

Right-justified fixed-width raw text, no padding

It is possible to construct raw English text that has
a justified right margin without employing any of the
space padding that is used by old formatting programs
like nroff that were designed to fake right justified
text using daisy-wheel printers and fixed-width fonts
reminiscent of typewriters. To show that it is not a
problem to do this, I offer this example (and if your
browser doesn't show this as right-justified, you are
using an insane font setting -- your fixed-width font
default must be a non-fixed-width font or something).
As Mark Liberman has pointed out in connection with a
message I recently sent him that had this property, a
problem in recreational computer science is suggested
by the possibility of right-justified raw text: write
a program that takes raw text paragraphs as input and
produces right-justified versions of them, respecting
certain tolerances and line-length preferences, using
transformations that preserve rough synonymy, varying
optional punctuation and substituting synonymous word
sequences as necessary but never adding extra spaces.